Main menu

Monthly Archives: September 2010

Naturally, Windows 7 (Pro, at least) doesn’t play nicely on a Mac OS X network environment out of the box. As far as I can tell, Windows 7 doesn’t utilize IPP, which Linux and Mac employ for printer sharing.

The situation: I wanted to print from my Mac laptop to my printer connected to Windows 7. To do this, I had to enable a feature disabled by default.

In Control Panel, have a look at Programs and Features. Then look under Turn Windows features on or off. Under Print and Document Services, check LPD Print Service to install and turn on this service, which will allow sharing your Windows 7 attached printer across your network.

Additionally, you need to specify to Windows the printer(s) you would like to share. From the Start menu or Control Panel, select Devices and Printers. Right-click on the printer and select Printer Properties. Under Sharing, select Share this printer and give it a share name without spaces.

On your Mac (the client), go to System Preferences then Print & Fax. Click the + to add a new printer. Under Advanced, set the Type as LPD/LPR printer. For the URL, enter lpd://ip_address/share_name/

For example, lpd://192.168.1.1/laserjet/

You may try using your machine’s name instead, but I had better luck using my IP address. If your IP address is dynamic and changes, this would obviously cause a problem. Select the correct driver based on your printer model, and give it a go!

So you just installed a fresh copy of the free multiplayer FPS game Urban Terror on Windows 7 (or possibly an earlier version). The problem is, you keep getting a “GLW_StartOpenGL() – could not load OpenGL subsystem” error when you try to launch it. You’re so close to fragging someone, yet so far. If your video drivers are up to date, then herein lies the solution:

The game’s default full-screen resolution doesn’t match a native resolution of your hardware. If you launch UT in windowed mode, you can then access the setup menu to select the correct video resolution.

Windows decided to overwrite my MBR and clobber grub. I was successful at restoring grub by taking the following actions. While this may be a self-serving reminder for the next time it happens, others may find it useful.

It’s worth noting that grub2, which ships with Ubuntu 10.04, has made some changes — mostly notably, /boot/grub/menu.lst has been replaced with /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Following restoration instructions for previous versions of grub will likely fail.

1. Boot from Ubuntu Live CD (Install disc)

2. Open terminal

3. Look at partitions to get device name

sudo fdisk -l

4. If your Linux partition is not marked as bootable, go to System->Administration->Disk Utility and mark the partition as bootable.

5. Create a mount point

sudo mkdir /mnt/linux

6. Mount the partition by device name found in step 3 (for example, /dev/sda1)

sudo mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/linux

7. Run grub-install, which will rewrite the MBR. Note that here you want to specify the device (ie, hard disk) but not the partition. So for /dev/sda1, you’d use /dev/sda.

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/linux/ /dev/sdX

8. Reboot and grub should load. You may wish to run sudo update-grub after rebooting to update /boot/grub/grub.cfg with any partition or OS changes.